Since I came back to work this week, after a two-week vacation, I've been dipping back into my stock of "serious" reading material. Right now, I'm reading a book addressed to mental health counsellors--their emotional needs, their theoretical orientations, their intervention strategies, their coping strategies, etc. The author offers up a (non-exhaustive) "checklist," itemizing those factors usually thought to contribute to a person's good mental health. He stresses that his list is the result of a union of APA standards as well as his own experience as both a counsellor and a university teacher in the field of mental health. He also points out that nobody manages to get all of these items down pat. The list is merely a guide pointing toward a goal, nothing more. I know that I, for one, still need to work on many more of these things than I'm comfortable admitting.
Here's the list:
-- Self-knowledge: knowledge of one's strengths, weaknesses, difficulties, limits, and needs, leading to a self-image congruent with reality
-- Self-acceptance
-- Self-confidence
-- Looking at the gap between one's "ideal" self and one's perceived "actual" self as a source of motivation and stimulation rather than as a source of self-depreciation and discouragement
-- The ability to strike a balance between thinking and feeling
-- The ability to remain on an even keel during stressful times
-- The ability to recover our sense of balance following stressful situations
-- The ability to use stress as a tool for growth and to see it as an opportunity to reach an eventually greater balance, by learning from our successes and failures in order to avoid repeating our mistakes
-- Respect toward others and sensitivity to their joys and sufferings
-- The ability to "touch" another and to let ourselves be "touched" by another; to interact with others; to establish contact with others; to forge friendships and lasting intimate relationships
-- The ability to reach certain levels of responsibility and "engagement"
-- The ability to reach a state of welfare; to enjoy who we are; to feel good "in our own skin"
-- The ability to feel pleasure; to enjoy sexuality
-- The ability to feel, and to express, emotions
-- The ability to see and hear what is actually "there," before us; to distinguish between interior stimuli (i.e., imagination) and exterior stimuli; a healthy contact with reality
-- The ability to use our judgement; to foresee the consequences of our actions
-- The ability to stand back and adopt a broader perspective when evaluating our own role in the situations we find ourselves in; the ability to self-criticize
-- The ability to plan and organize
-- The ability to continuously develop and strive for personal goals
-- The ability to adapt to our environment while yet heeding our own needs
-- The ability to meet existential issues, such as loneliness and death, head on
So there you have it, a basic checklist. By the way, I'm not posting this because I think anyone here needs to learn from it. No, far from it. I just thought it would make good fuel for discussion, is all. For what it's worth, though, right now I feel I've got a handle on maybe ten or eleven of these twenty-one "factors." I plan to forge ahead.
Comments welcome.
Love,
CJ
I have had the opposite problem I have had to struggle not to beat up on myself when I didn't live up to the high standards that others and I had set for me.
)
This move into a new home is a perfect example of things going right out the window!
